Conventional screen readers, i.e. software applications that attempt to interpret what is being displayed on a user interface screen and present the content in another form, which is usually speech, typically fare poorly when pronouncing network addresses such as electronic mail (email) addresses or Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) (which have a format similar to that of email address, with a prepended “sip:”). For example, an email address of “sjones@work.us” may be pronounced “sss-jones at work dot us” rather than the more conventional human pronunciation “ess jones at work dot you ess”. Alternatively, conventional screen readers may spell out the email address in full, i.e. speak each character individually (e.g. “ess jay oh en . . . ”), which is tedious for the listener to listen to. For clarity, the foregoing quoted expressions represent pronunciations of the email addresses, as a typical speaker of the language might spell the pronunciations. These pronunciations could alternatively be represented by symbolic expressions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is a precise phonetic system using non-ASCII symbols to represent most (if not all) of the sounds that humans are capable of uttering.
A new approach for facilitating text-to-speech conversion of network addresses, or portions thereof, for use in screen readers or in other contexts would be desirable.